The elusiveness of early modern English kitchens strikes from at least three directions: (1) they were too core to the operation of civilization to survive without the forces of change erasing earlier forms; (2) they were so thoroughly created through the choreography of activities taking place within them to leave records that come anywhere close to reflecting the flow of such time-patterning actions; and (3), most problematic of all, they were and continue to be associated with women. The fact that they were not exclusively female spaces is an important message that Sara Pennell has to impart in The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600–1850 (129–33), however, it is not through rightly re-associating kitchens with male work, especially in commercial kitchens, that we will find a way out of a vicious circle and inductive cul-de-sac: women's work is so comprehensively undervalued across time and space that even Pennell's plethora of fascinating insights about the premodern kitchen may not be enough to change our collective minds about the role that we accord all these purposeful spaces of food preparation.

So Pennell has produced, then, a brave book. Its bravado lies in embracing a challenging topic and in its commitment to drawing on every conceivable source type to resurrect the spaces that ensured that between 1600 and 1850 the population of England might eat cooked victuals, as opposed to raw foodstuffs, at least occasionally. Its eight tightly argued chapters result from her archival and interpretive exploits, and in them she deals with the historiographical absence (“Where is the kitchen?”), changing contemporary ideas about kitchens, the physical location of kitchens and the technologies that combine in them, as well as all that which was to be found inside them: the utensils, the human and other beings, and even the non-corporeal, and no less important, the presence of spiritualism and morality. She concludes with a knowing look at kitchen displays as encountered in museums or in restored and preserved dwellings.

While Pennell argues for “birth” mainly on an architectural level and in terms of the birth of a distinct space (chapter 3), one suspects an element of tongue in cheek in the title. The quarter of a millennium of stubborn continuity blended with incremental yet fundamental change, which is in turn refracted through the prism of social milieu into the most elusive denouement, indicates a difficult birth as well as an author prudent enough to expect one. To capture culture at its foundations, epic time scales are needed, and it follows that epic titles are befitting. Given Pennell's insights about who might be found in kitchens, and for what reasons (chapter 6), it seems likely that not a few actual births took place there, too.

Pennell stirs up some necessary thought processes in her reader: What defines a kitchen? Is a kitchen a kitchen when its primary purpose is the preparation of food? And what do we make of depictions such as “Cobler's Hall,” a late eighteenth-century mezzotint reproduced and analyzed for the rare and literal as much as the allegorical insights into such a space (8–9)? On the left, it shows a man at the cobbler's workbench facing the shop window and on the right a woman at the hearth preparing food. Apart from the subtler messages contained in the image, carefully unpicked for the reader, its most obvious message about space is that these two persons share one and the same room in a multifunctional spatial arrangement that complicates neat categorization. And “complicating” is what Pennell intended all along. One suspects that in most instances recognizing a kitchen space for what it is would not be a problem. Kitchens, during the period covered by Pennell, were spaces where fire and water were deployed, even if the water was not as yet, as Pennell reminds us, piped into the house. Sustenance is produced in this space, where fire and water, two of the four elements from which homes and houses supposedly shelter those dwelling inside them, combine.

Even more than the accomplishments, however, the cracks and breaks make the reader appreciate that this has been a brave undertaking. Complexity, absence, or hiddenness of primary material, and the historian attempting to do justice to kitchen history from the end of the Tudors to the Victorians will result in a story that is of necessity rich in anecdote. In fact, one is tempted to consider the very houses of those who have left most of the documents, inventories, cookery books, servants lists, and such like that afford the glimpses from which to reconstruct such a fractured mosaic (a process Pennell openly acknowledges). In short, the evidence produced by those whose kitchens were large and stood a chance of physical survival and recognizable distinctiveness as a separate, specialist space, to be least likely to illuminate us on the point of kitchen's centrality and multi-functionality in everyday lives. Those who have dipped their toe in writing about early modern kitchens will ultimately agree with Amanda Vickery's endorsement of Pennell's study as “deeply impressive, immersive and multifaceted”; it is all that and puts “the overlooked kitchen on the scholarly map” (back cover) by showing us how much may be gained from not losing sight of the engine room.